People don’t buy products, they buy solutions.
I drive a Honda Civic. It has a 1.8 liter 4 cylinder engine. It has 4 doors. It gets 26 miles to the gallon in the city. It can tow 1000 lbs.
Literally none of this matters to me at all.
My dutiful car has served me well for many years. It gets me to and from my meetings. It lets me pick my wife up from work. It gets me from A to B. It has taken me on adventures all over the country. It’s at least reasonably good to the environment, and it saves me money at the gas pump.
This is what matters.
When it comes to my car, or any product, the technical specs only matter in so much in as they let me accomplish what I want to do. Technical specs in and of themselves aren’t exciting for 99% of your merchants. They’re masters of *their* craft, of *their* business, not of the finer technical aspects of your payment technology.
When a merchant is engaging with you to buy your point of sale software or business solution, they’re doing so in the hopes that you can help make their lives easier, increase their sales, and bring order to the chaos that is their day-to-day struggle.
They care very little about granular changes in security, or a quarter of a second faster processing speed. We as payment professionals understand the importance of these things, but we as an industry haven’t done a great job communicating our value to merchants. Merchants care that you’re providing them with a reliable tool that helps them conduct *their* business without any surprises. The merchant landscape is cutthroat enough, and ISOs with the merchants’ needs at the core of their mission can be a real ally helping them navigate an increasingly complex payments landscape.
As one of the many pieces of the entire payments eco-system, we’re very lucky to have an insider look at the industry, and we’ve seen time and time again that when an ISO speaks clearly about benefits and communicate value, they win. Don’t take our word for it, however. Just take a look at one of our partners: Sureswipe. The first thing you see when you visit their website is that they simplify payments, they’re fast to setup, and then the very next section is how their process works. This simple yet effective way of speaking to micro-merchants is part of the reason they won “Best Payment Deployment in Africa.” What does everything you do, every way you work, tell your merchants about how much you understand their needs?
So, as an industry, let’s do our best to get back to the basics of providing real value to our consumers, not bombarding them with acronyms and complex analogies. This is a core mission of ours here at Handpoint. With our focus on semi-integrated mobile solutions, we often times rely on our partners to communicate the value our solutions provide to merchants and *their* businesses, and we take seriously our responsibility in working hard to support this effort. After all, we only do better together.
